Pickup in iOS 7 Web traffic titillates Apple-watchers

Ars and other sites report an increase in iOS 7 devices on their server logs.

Ars has seen a pickup in traffic from devices out of Cupertino claiming to use iOS 7, but it's not a ton.

Apple's engineers are apparently ramping up their testing of iOS 7, as evidenced by Web traffic on Ars and various other sites. First noted by mobile content company Onswipe and followed up by MacRumors, devices that claim to be using iOS 7—coming from Apple's IP block in Cupertino—started showing up more and more around April 30. But while some describe it as a spike in traffic, our own analysis shows that traffic using iOS 7 is still relatively low.

Onswipe described the change as a "significant bump" in the number of visits from iPads and iPhones using iOS 7. In fact, Onswipe claims 75 percent of the visits to its partner sites came from iPhones, while iPads represented roughly a quarter of those visits. MacRumors posted its own traffic graph without explicit numbers, saying it has seen a "surge" in iOS 7 visits over the last week.

Upon analyzing Ars' traffic logs, we can see a trend closely mirroring that of MacRumors' (see graph at the top of this post). Around April 29-30, visits from devices claiming to be running iOS 7 began to pick up, and the numbers seem to be rising as the days go on. But we're talking about around 100 (or lower) on most days, with only the highest point going up past 100. For us, the large majority of those are on iPads—we can count the number of visits from iPhones or iPod touches on one hand.

Does that count as a significant spike? Not really, and it's not surprising, either. Apple's engineers have reportedly been working overtime—some even being pulled off OS X projects—in order to prep iOS 7 for demonstration at next month's Worldwide Developers Conference. The company is allegedly behind its own internal schedule when it comes to iOS 7, though sources claim the update is still on track for a fall release. If the OS is only just making its way into usable form, it shouldn't be a surprise to see some minor pickup in Web traffic. Otherwise, we're not holding our breath for anything crazy like an early release.

Why don't they spoof the Safari agent string in the prerelease versions of the OS??? I remember people discovering iOS 5 and 6 in web logs, from users located in Cupertino, and same question was raised then. Why not spoof the agent string?

You folks at Ars are assumed to have some technical credentials. Assuming that is true, how can you publish a one dimensional "graph". Without an ordinate, and some units for that ordinate the graph tells us nothing. Are these thousands of calls, thousands of minutes, megabytes of data transfered? Even a percentage of, say iOS 6 traffic would have given some idea of the significance of that line. As it stands its meaningless.

You folks at Ars are assumed to have some technical credentials. Assuming that is true, how can you publish a one dimensional "graph". Without an ordinate, and some units for that ordinate the graph tells us nothing. Are these thousands of calls, thousands of minutes, megabytes of data transfered? Even a percentage of, say iOS 6 traffic would have given some idea of the significance of that line. As it stands its meaningless.

Why don't they spoof the Safari agent string in the prerelease versions of the OS??? I remember people discovering iOS 5 and 6 in web logs, from users located in Cupertino, and same question was raised then. Why not spoof the agent string?

They likely do earlier in the development process. There's likely many reasons Apple doesn't at this point in the development process, it could be anything from wanting to create a little buzz around iOS-NEXT, to doing testing to ensure that there aren't any brain-dead web developers out there that coded version checks that are broken with a new version of iOS.

Why don't they spoof the Safari agent string in the prerelease versions of the OS??? I remember people discovering iOS 5 and 6 in web logs, from users located in Cupertino, and same question was raised then. Why not spoof the agent string?

Whenever we were off the Apple campus network, e.g. in our homes, we modified Safari to enable its real user agent string. And we had to do this for compatibility testing. That allowed me to tweak the string for maximum compatibility with the websites of that time. Which explains why the Safari user agent string has so much extra information in it, e.g. KHTML, like Gecko — the names of other browser engines.

We couldn’t ship with the real Safari user agent string disabled, but we came up with the next best thing — automatically enabling it after a certain date. Just about this time 10 years ago, days before it was to debut, Safari went from hiding its light under a bushel to being proud of who it really was.